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He said, “Uh, you’re going to handle it like that when it’s purified too? Is that what you’re going to do?”
They said, “Sure—why not?”
“Won’t it explode?” he said.
Huh! Explode?
Then the army said, “You see! We shouldn’t have let any information get to them! Now they are all upset.”
It turned out that the army had realized how much stuff we needed to make a bomb—twenty kilograms or whatever it was—and they realized that this much material, purified, would never be in the plant, so there was no danger. But they did not know that the neutrons were enormously more effective when they are slowed down in water. In water it takes less than a tenth—no, a hundredth—as much material to make a reaction that makes radioactivity. It kills people around and so on. It was very dangerous, and they had not paid any attention to the safety at all.
So a telegram goes from Oppenheimer to Segre: “Go through the entire plant. Notice where all the concentrations are supposed to be, with the process as they designed it. We will calculate in the meantime how much material can come together before there’s an explosion.”
Two groups started working on it. Christy’s group worked on water solutions and my group worked on dry powder in boxes. We calculated about how much material they could accumulate safely. And Christy was going to go down and tell them all at Oak Ridge what the situation was, because this whole thing is broken down and we have to go down and tell them now. So I happily gave all my numbers to Christy and said, you have all the stuff, so go. Christy got pneumonia; I had to go.
I had never traveled on an airplane before. They strapped the secrets in a little thing on my back! The airplane in those days was like a bus, except the stations were further apart. You stopped off every once in a while to wait.
There was a guy standing there next to me swinging a chain, saying something like, “It must be terribly difficult to fly without a priority on airplanes these days.”
I couldn’t resist. I said, “Well, I don’t know. I have a priority.
A little bit later he tried again. “There are some generals coming. They are going to put off some of us number threes.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a number two.”
He probably wrote to his congressman—if he wasn’t a congressman himself—saying, “What are they doing sending these little kids around with number two priorities in the middle of the war?”
At any rate, I arrived at Oak Ridge. The first thing I did was have them take me to the plant, and I said nothing. I just looked at everything. I found out that the situation was even worse than Segre reported, because he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn’t notice a lot of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall—and things like that. Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.
So I went through the entire plant. I have a very bad memory but when I work intensively I have a good shortterm memory and so I could remember all kinds of crazy things like building 90-207, vat number so-and-so, and so forth.
I went to my room that night, and went through the whole thing, explained where all the dangers were, and what you would have to do to fix this. It’s rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense, according to certain rules.
The next day there was going to be a big meeting. I forgot to say that before I left Los Alamos Oppenheimer said to me, “Now, the following people are technically able down there at Oak Ridge: Mr. Julian Webb, Mr. So-and-so, and so on. I want you to make sure that these people are at the meeting, that you tell them how the thing can be made safe, so that they really understand.”
I said, “What if they’re not at the meeting? What am I supposed to do?”
He said, “Then you should say: Los Alamos ca
I said, “You mean me, little Richard, is going to go in there and say—?”
He said, “Yes, little Richard, you go and do that.”
I really grew up fast!
When I arrived, sure enough, the big shots in the company and the technical people that I wanted were there, and the generals and everyone who was interested in this very serious problem. That was good because the plant would have blown up if nobody had paid attention to this problem.
There was a Lieutenant Zumwalt who took care of me. He told me that the colonel said I shouldn’t tell them how the neutrons work and all the details because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to keep it safe.
I said, “In my opinion it is impossible for them to obey a bunch of rules unless they understand how it works. It’s my opinion that it’s only going to work if I tell them, and Los Alamos ca
It was great. The lieutenant takes me to the colonel and repeats my remark. The colonel says, “Just five minutes,” and then he goes to the window and he stops and thinks. That’s what they’re very good at—making decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes. So I have a great deal of respect for these military guys, because I never can decide anything very important in any length of time at all.
In five minutes he said, “All right, Mr. Feynman, go ahead.”
I sat down and I told them all about neutrons, how they worked, da da, ta ta ta, there are too many neutrons together, you’ve got to keep the material apart, cadmium absorbs, and slow neutrons are more effective than fast neutrons, and yak yak—all of which was elementary stuff at Los Alamos, but they had never heard of any of it, so I appeared to be a tremendous genius to them.
The result was that they decided to set up little groups to make their own calculations to learn how to do it. They started to redesign plants, and the designers of the plants were there, the construction designers, and engineers, and chemical engineers for the new plant that was going to handle the separated material.
They told me to come back in a few months, so I came back when the engineers had finished the design of the plant. Now it was for me to look at the plant.
How do you look at a plant that isn’t built yet? I don’t know. Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was always coming around with me because I had to have an escort everywhere, takes me into this room where there are these two engineers and a loooooong table covered with a stack of blueprints representing the various floors of the proposed plant.
I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there’s an evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it’ll explode. So they explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any one valve gets stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves everywhere.
Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here, the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second floor, bluuuuurp—going through the stack of blueprints, downup-down-up, talking very fast, explaining the very very complicated chemical plant.